/futurama

Soooo, I fell off the planet. Individuals in this community were affected by that, and I’m remorseful. I could tell a long sob-story about what happened to me in the interim, but instead, let’s just pretend it had something to do with space travel, dinosaurs, lasers, ninja pirates, rocket boots and pizza.

I’d occasionally check PVB, seeing what the people I felt I was letting down were up to. And when I learned that the Mario’s Tennis multiplayer project had to be put on hold because I never got that emulator ready that I was so passionate about… Well, I’m determined to make things right. (-:

With the experience I gained over the past year and a half, I’m more equipped than ever to keep VB life and non-VB life in their own individual lanes. I haven’t forgotten the promises I made to this community, and let it be known that I still fully intend to see them through. With the weather changing outside, I’m fired up to get back into the swing of things. \o/

So what’s up? How’s everyone doing? Anything that needs my attention before I start budgeting my time (shocking, I know) for PVB-related projects?

Glad to hear you’re still alive! Saying you let the community down is a bit harsh. You must remember we own Virtual Boys, delay is our middle name! Hell, we waited 22 years for the 2 player support that was initially promised!

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Sometimes real life is a PITA and doesn’t care about what you want. I think we can all related to that. I’m sure it’s safe to say we’re just happy to have you back.

Guy I for one am very glad that you are back. Don’t worry about anything you are always welcome here.

As someone that doesn’t have the programming or hardware developing skills to contribute to the community, I’m sure I speak for many in saying that you shouldn’t be hard on yourself because we consider all of these talented people’s contributions an awesome bonus. Take care of yourself and your business and VB when you can, I say!

All of that said, what “promises” are you referring to? What are your projects/hopes? Looks like you are working on an emulato?. Tell me more about your project/goals is you care to when able. I love hearing about all the great stuff going on in the community these days!

Promises I haven’t technically failed to deliver on:

Emulator
Emulators for video game systems are a dime a dozen, but more often than not have quite limited features when it comes to doing pretty much anything other than playing games. Since I want to completely master Virtual Boy, I decided it was high time to make an emulator the way I like, with all the development and TAS features I could dream up.

The project comes in two pieces: a portable core library and a cross-platform GUI application. The emulation core, to be written in C, will be available for anyone to use in their own projects. It doesn’t make use of any system calls–it’s just pure C code for emulating a Virtual Boy. The GUI application is a graphical program that uses the C core to do the dirty work.

Development Tools
I haven’t seen dasi in like a year and a half, but he did the hard work on getting a new Virtual Boy devkit put together. devkitV810 isn’t publicly released yet, but it’s pretty slick and has good support for things like interrupts. I myself have been working on a Virtual Boy development library for it that exposes all of the system features to C programs.

Audio Library and Music Composer
Since audio is a trickier topic to tackle for developers than graphics or timing, I wanted to give PVB a way to work with it and not have to worry about the nitty-gritties. An extension of that project is a music engine and a composer application to make the music for it.

The Sacred Tech Scroll, Version 1.0
Long ago I published a document detailing the inner workings of the Virtual Boy. It was incomplete and contained many errors. A new draft of the document is in the works that is being revised as research into the hardware progresses. A full release of the document will contain anything learned during emulator development.
__________

Unsurprisingly, all of these projects hinge on the emulator–even the devkit, which can’t be complete until the hardware is fully researched. So, naturally, the emulator is going to be my main priority unless someone needs my help with something.

That all sounds awesome. Good luck with everything. It will come in time. One thing VB fans are is patient!